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(15) That the soul is of the family of the diviner nature,
the eternal, is clear from our demonstration that it is not
material: besides it has neither shape or colour nor is it
tangible. But there are other proofs.
Assuming that the divine and the authentically existent possesses
a life beneficent and wise, we take the next step and begin with
working out the nature of our own soul.
Let us consider a soul, not one that has appropriated the
unreasoned desires and impulses of the bodily life, or any other
such emotion and experience, but one that has cast all this
aside, and as far as possible has no commerce with the bodily.
Such a soul demonstrates that all evil is accretion, alien, and
that in the purged soul the noble things are immanent, wisdom and
all else that is good, as its native store.
If this is the soul once it has returned to its self, how deny
that it is the nature we have identified with all the divine and
eternal? Wisdom and authentic virtue are divine, and could not be
found in the chattel mean and mortal: what possesses these must
be divine by its very capacity of the divine, the token of
kinship and of identical substance.
Hence, too, any one of us that exhibits these qualities will
differ but little as far as soul is concerned from the Supernals;
he will be less than they only to the extent in which the soul
is, in him, associated with body.
This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or
if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be
so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It
is because we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass
that it becomes difficult to recognize their divinity and
immortality.
To know the nature of a thing we must observe it in its unalloyed
state, since any addition obscures the reality. Clear, then look:
or, rather, let a man first purify himself and then observe: he
will not doubt his immortality when he sees himself thus entered
into the pure, the Intellectual. For, what he sees is an
Intellectual-Principle looking on nothing of sense, nothing of
this mortality, but by its own eternity having intellection of
the eternal: he will see all things in this Intellectual
substance, himself having become an Intellectual Kosmos and all
lightsome, illuminated by the truth streaming from The Good,
which radiates truth upon all that stands within that realm of
the divine.
Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word "Farewell: I am
to you an immortal God," for he has ascended to the Supreme, and
is all one strain to enter into likeness with it.
If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest,
then, too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only
authentic knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither
outside of itself that the soul understands morality and right
conduct: it learns them of its own nature, in its contact with
itself, in its intellectual grasp of itself, seeing deeply
impressed upon it the images of its primal state; what was one
mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity.
Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it,
all that kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing
itself as gold; seen now unalloyed it is at once filled with
admiration of its worth and knows that it has no need of any
other glory than its own, triumphant if only it be allowed to
remain purely to itself.
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